The estimated death count, which increased nearly ten-fold from Saturday, could rise even higher as rescue workers struggle to reach highly damaged areas where survivors are searching the wreckage for loved ones and foraging for food.

"We have no food, we need water and other things to survive," Edward Gualberto toldAFP at the outskirts of Tacloban—the coastal city hardest hit by the super-storm.

"People are walking like zombies looking for food," said Jenny Chu, a medical student in Leyte, in an interview with Reuters.

Earlier:

At least 1,200 lives have been lost, the Red Cross estimates, after super-typhoon Haiyan, likely the strongest storm to ever make landfall, slammed into the Philippines, leaving cities and towns in coastal areas devastated and bodies rotting in the streets.

"We estimate 1,000 people were killed in Tacloban and 200 in Samar province," said Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, of these island areas.

While the red cross expects to have a more precise count Sunday, they say it could take days to measure the true scale of this human tragedy, as communications are down in some of the hardest-hit areas.

Captain John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, told the Associated Press that his staff reports more than 100 bodies lying in the streets of Tacloban, which was hardest hit by the typhoon.

Tacloban residents are searching the wreckage for food and water, CNNreports.

Six central Philippine islands were devastated when the typhoon hit Friday, with heavy flood water and fierce winds inflicting the most damage. "The sea engulfed Tacloban," said ABS-CBN television anchor Ted Failon, filing a report on Friday from Tacloban.

Simon Redfern, a professor of Earth sciences at Cambridge, explains that there is likely a link between climate change and increasing storm intensity: "As the planet and particularly the oceans heat, simple physics indicates that the energy stored is likely to increase the intensity and frequency of devastating storms like Haiyan, at great cost to coastal communities."

He adds, "While individual storms such as Haiyan cannot be directly attributed to such changes, the statistics of such storms will help build a picture of how climate change is affecting the planet."

The storm is moving quickly towards Vietnam, which it is expected to reach on Sunday.

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Further

On this day 50 years ago, a platoon of U.S. soldiers entered the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam and, in hours, massacred 504 unarmed women, children and old men. Over 300 of the victims were younger than 12; the G.I.s also raped many of the women and burned all the homes. Today, with torturers and warmongers on the rise, the horrors of My Lai serve as a grim warning. In America's wars of choice, says one vet, we are all "one step away from My Lai."